Important links: Syllabus, form for submitting homework.
Readings available in accessible format are included as hyperlinks below. Alternate methods of obtaining the readings will be discussed in class. Some required games and other playable media must be purchased; these are noted with a â$â symbol. (Total cost of materials for the class is not expected to exceed US$30.) Itâs always better to play these games with friends and fellow classmates!
Sessions are loosely grouped into the following âunitsâ:
Date: 2025-01-21.
To be discussed in session 02. Consider while playing âHer Storyâ the relationship between story (the underlying events of the plot) and discourse (how the story is told). How are they interrelated? Can they be separated? How is this form of discourse appropriate (or inappropriate) to the story? Jesper Juulâs âGame of objectsâ helps identify and call into question what properties bestow objecthood in visual/interactive contexts, concluding that âgame worlds are fundamentally not designed as bottom-up simulations of a world, but are deliberately implemented in human categories, and that we understand them as such.â Do you agree with this? What are the ramifications of this for narrative theory and narrative design? The Koenitz et al. paper provides a catalogue of narrative structures from âoutside the dominant canon of western print literature and cinematic worksâ in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of âthe supposed universal model of the Monomyth/dramatic arc.â
Optional supplementary reading and play:
Due at the beginning of session 02. Create a system for generating stories. The system should be based on some kind of formalism or abstraction about narrativeâmaybe one that you read about in the reading, or maybe one that youâve devised yourself. Be weird and opinionated. Your system should provide a set of instructions to follow (or an interface to interact with), and at the end produce some kind of story. The system should be expressive, i.e., following the instructions multiple times should produce noticeably different stories. This doesnât have to be a computer program! Feel free to use non-digital tools (like dice and decks of index cards) or low-computation digital tools (spreadsheets, Google Docs, etc.).
Resources to consult:
Date: 2025-01-28.
To be discussed in session 03.
Read the following. The purpose of these readings is to give you a vocabulary for talking about interactive forms of narrative, and to give you a set of tools for connecting your narrative ideas to tools and techniques for implementing those ideas. âThe Whys and Wherefores of Game Analysisâ is a good overview of how to approach and talk about games critically. I think the basic structure can also be used to think critically about interactive experiences in general. FernĂĄndez-Varaâs âTypes of Narrative Choicesâ describes how different kinds of narrative choice are presented to players, and demonstrates the effects that these choices have; Ashwellâs âStandard Patterns in Choice-Basedâ games instead focuses on the underlying hypertext structures that might result from implementing these kinds of decisions. Mason and Bernsteinâs paper catalogues styles of links and discusses their effects in an experimental fashion by applying different link styles to the same passage.
Optional, to contextualize Twine:
Date: 2025-02-04.
To be discussed in session 04.
Read/play the following. Characterize how the these works make use of the affordances of hypertext and branching narrative. How are they different, how are they similar? What kinds of decisions do these works ask of the person interacting with them? How are the hypertext structures appropriate or not appropriate to the content (to the extent that form and content can be separated)?
Optional, but recommended:
Date: 2025-02-11.
Due at the beginning of session 05. Use Twine to make something. A few ideas:
Consider how the hypertext structure of your game reflects and enforces the kinds of decisions you want the reader/player to make, and the experiences you hope to evoke. Consider also how Twineâs scripting capabilities augment (or detract from) the node/edge structure of the game.
Here are some good and helpful Twine games. Think about how each works (structurally) as a hypertext, and how each makes use of Twineâs capabilities.
Optional additional readings:
You may also be interested in âstoryletsâ (or âquality-based narrativesâ), in which hypertext is presented not as a sequence of nodes and edges, but as a database of lexia that are presented to the player when those passages match the current game state. Read more about storylets on Emily Shortâs blog. Some examples of games that use storylets:
There are several implementations for storylets for Sugarcube, including tiny-qbn (watch the creatorsâ talk about it at NarraScope 2020) and StoryletManager. Twineâs Harlowe format has built-in support for storylets.
Date: 2025-02-25. (Please note the date!)
Bitsy resources:
A few of my favorite Bitsy games:
Due at the beginning of session 06.
Bitsy is a minimalist authoring system that affords the creation of interactive experiences focused on environmental storytelling. Make a short Bitsy game that takes advantage of this affordance. Consider: what actions can be undertaken in a Bitsy game? (What are the âverbsâ?) Bitsy enforces a certain kind of visual style. What effect does this have on games that are made with the system?
Date: 2025-03-04.
To be discussed in session 07. These works simulate space and objects in space in different ways. Characterize the benefits and shortcomings of their approaches.
Optional but recommended:
Some of my other parser-based interactive fiction faves:
Date: 2025-03-11.
Claire Evansâ chapter puts Will Crowtherâs Adventure in both historical and interpersonal context. The excerpt from 10 print presents the maze, found so often in interactive fiction (and many other video games) as a fundamental variety of simulated space, and places it in historical and literary context. (You may want to read the first few sections of the introduction to 10 print to contextualize the Mazes excerpt.) Mark Sampleâs essay claims that the conventional of cardinal directions in interactive fiction, in concert with the trope of mazes (âtwisty little passagesâ) in the genre, shows an Orientalist bias. Do you agree? Are there other conventions in IF (or other forms of computational narrative) that show similar biases? How would you design systems for narrative that are intentional and expressive in their biases? Ruberg contrasts the queer subject matter of Gone Home with the ârigid and linearâ path the game imposes on player movement. Is âplayer movement⊠an important site of meaning in video gamesâ? What alternatives are there to the kinds of player movement often implemented in âimmersiveâ narrative games (whether text based or 3D)?
Optional reading:
The Jerz reading is a deep, detailed paper on Crowtherâs âAdventure,â including its social, physical, cultural context and its source code (!). Along the way, it discusses interactive fictionâs history and legacy. While reading, consider: Is it important that âAdventureâ is made out of text (and not, e.g., a 3D environment)? Is âAdventureâ âliteraryâ? How does the software implementation of âAdventureâ affect its form and its interactive affordances?
Date: 2025-03-18.
Due at the beginning of session 09. Pick a location or scene from an existing story (say, any variant of Cinderella) and âimplementâ it in Inform 7 by e.g. creating rooms with descriptions, objects to populate the rooms, and/or characters to talk to. The emphasis of this assignment is on building the storyworld, rather than creating a compelling interactive experience. Bonus: Implement a custom command/action in your story. Bonus 2: Make it possible to âwinâ your game (by, e.g., solving a puzzle, gaining a certain number of points, etc.).
Date: 2025-04-01. (Again, please note the date!)
To be discussed in session 10. These works make use of data, simulation and text generation to produce narrative artifacts. Compare and contrast their approaches.
To play/read/listen/review:
Date: 2025-04-08.
To be discussed in session 11. All of these readings describe methods of simulating the operation of a physical and/or social system in order to produce compelling narratives (or narrative-esque artifacts). Compare and contrast their approaches.
Optional:
Date: 2025-04-15.
Make use of one of the techniques discussed in this unit (grammar-based generation, simulation, emergent narrative) to produce a computer-generated narrative.
Finish reading Subcutanean.
Date: 2025-04-22.
Date: 2025-04-29.
Date: 2025-05-06.
Previous iterations of this class had a unit on character and dialogue. For posterityâs sake, here are links to that content:
Suggested games and readings:
RenâPy resources:
